Niall Ferguson

Scottish historian at Hoover Institution — author of The Pity of War, Empire, The Ascent of Money, Civilization, and Kissinger — the most commercially successful academic historian of his generation — whose rehabilitation of British imperialism and contrarian geopolitical views make him consistently controversial.

Creates the counterfactual as a legitimate historical method — Ferguson's insistence that historians must consider what would have happened if different choices had been made (his arguments that WWI was a British mistake, that the British Empire had net positive effects) forced historians to engage with the counterfactual, improving causal historical analysis.